Good morning. It looks like another busy day of meetings, memos,
phone calls and, of course, driving all over town. As you
start-and-stop your way down your first freeway of the morning,
downloading your first Starbucks Venti of the morning, wouldn't
it be great to also be down-loading your e-mail and schedule into
your Palm handheld?

Better yet, how about doing it without taking your hands off the
steering wheel or your eyes off the oversized SUV in front of you?
What if you could tell your Palm to read your e-mail out loud and
dictate replies to other team members?

In the future, right? Actually, really mobile computing is
already coming your way. Before the end of the year, large retail
automotive and consumer electronics out lets should be selling the
Com-muniport Mobile Productivity Center for Palm handhelds.

Developed by Delphi Automotive Systems, the Communi-port
autosync cradle for the Palm V and VII models translates your voice
into lingo the Palm can understand and your stored Palm data into
computer-generated speech. It fits in your car's cup holder,
pulls juice from the cigarette lighter and links to your cell
phone.

The Communiport taps the Internet either through Palm's
Palm.Net or your cell phone's wireless service provider.
According to Delphi, its price will be up to individual
dis-tributors, who will probably slap their own labels on it.

Wireless World

By now, we've become accustomed-maybe even a little
addicted-to wireless communications on our cell phones. Wireless
computing over the Internet is bound to be just as popular, say
analysts, once we work out the details of crunching Web pages down
into small PDA and cell phone displays.

IDC predicts that U.S. unit shipments of wireless consumer
information appliances-like PDAs and gaming consoles-will climb
from 11 million units today to about 89 million units by 2004. And
even more people will use cell phones for Internet data services:
IDC expects the number to jump from a mere 60,000 Americans today
to 94 million by 2004-and 560 million users worldwide. Small wonder
that cell phone and PDA-makers alike are high on wireless data
access-none more so than handheld leader Palm.

"We think wireless capability is the next big thing,"
says Palm's chief competitive officer Michael Mace.
"We're working to bring wireless capability into all Palm
handhelds as quickly as we can."

Expect built-in wireless connectivity to be a part of all future
Palm OS hand- helds, says Mace, including new releases next year.
Some will come from new Palm partners like Sony, which, by this
Christmas, will release its first Palm handheld with a slot for its
own chewing-gum-sized memory sticks.

Handheld-OS-makers Microsoft, Palm and Psion are also busy
swapping technology with wireless voice experts like Ericsson,
Kyocera, Motorola and Nokia, who are anxious to add Internet
browsing and PIM features to their coming generation of
"smart" cell phones.

Currently, though, your browsing is pretty much limited to Web
pages specially formatted for handhelds. For example, Palm VII
owners are required to subscribe to Palm.Net wireless service and
can only download pages from the 350-plus sites that support the
browserless Palm's "Web clipping" protocol.

Owners of the Palm V and Palm Vx can branch out by buying
OmniSky's $299 (street) Minstrel V wireless modem and
subscribing to its new wireless service. OmniSky opens up most of
the Web by stripping pages of large graphics and banner ads, but
only 1,000 or so Web sites really fit the Palm display. Still,
those include popular sites like Yahoo! and Amazon.com.

Similarly, handhelds derived from Microsoft's Windows
CE/Pocket PC operating system can use the built-in Pocket Internet
Explorer microbrowser to surf any Web site. But the experience
isn't that gratifying unless your destination is a page on
Microsoft's MSN network or other partner sites whose servers
optimize Web site content for display on Pocket PCs.

One of the early movers in providing Web browsing to both Pocket
PC and Palm owners is AvantGo. Subscribers to wireless services
other than Palm.Net are allowed by a free AvantGo account to browse
and download Web pages from any Web site. The AvantGo portal
massages any site's data a little for handheld display. But
those downloads are nothing compared to the news, stock quotes and
other content and applications you get from the 400 or so AvantGo
channels that have optimized their Web pages.

Phone.com is at the hub of providing cell phone users wireless
computing. A co-developer of the Wireless Application Protocol
(WAP) for Web data display, Phone.com licenses its WAP-compatible
UP.Browser or UP.Link server to major wireless carriers such as
Sprint and AT&T. They, in turn, use Phone.com's software to
make Web pages palatable to phone displays.

Will Wap Wag The Web?

Wireless Web browsing is taking its first tentative steps, but
its potential is huge. According to IDC, as WAP microbrowsers and
compatible Web servers proliferate, unlimited Web access will be
coming to a PDA, cell phone, laptop, pager-maybe an everyday
kitchen appliance-near you. When? IDC figures that within 18
months, there will be more worldwide wireless subscribers capable
of Internet access than wired Web browsers.

"Once there are more wireless Internet users than wired
users, Webmasters may first consider the needs of the wireless
users and, secondly, the wired PC users," predicts IDC vice
president Iain Gillott.

Things happen quickly on the Internet. It's not only driving
growth for PDAs and phones, but also driving their architectures
toward one another. For example, Nokia is licensing the Palm OS for
its new generation of Internet-capable smart phones. Palm's
easy-to-use interface code and PDA applications will be integrated
with the Epoc phone operating system from Psion. In addition to
traditional phone services and new voice technology from Nokia, the
phones will include a Palm interface and Palm-like stylus for use
with most of Palm's many existing applications.

The question is, will cell phones start looking like PDAs or
PDAs like cell phones? Maybe we're headed for a hybrid such as
Kyocera's pdQ, an oversized smart phone that runs Palm
applications. "People will passionately argue for one or the
other, but frankly, nobody has a clue how this will play out,"
says Mace. "Personally, I think more people will want a
two-piece solution-connecting their Palm to their cell phone so
they don't have to replace one when they replace the
other."

As the leader in the area of handheld computing, Palm's
decisions matter. With more than 6 million handhelds served,
it's sitting on an incredible 78 percent of the remote
computing market, according to IDC.

A Little Help . . .

Like Apple Computer, Palm started life as a hardware-maker whose
real strength was its operating system. Now it's become a
platform developer licensing its software to third-party hardware-
and software-makers, much as Microsoft does with its Windows
CE/Pocket PC operating system. Palm has signed up more than 80,000
developers-about 15,000 in just the past couple of months.

So far, Microsoft boasts about 60 partners for its new Windows
CE/Pocket PC platform and has pretty much the same game plan as
Palm for wireless handheld expansion. It will support the whole
gamut of solutions-built-in transceivers, clip-on modems, cell
phone-to-PDA cables, add-in cards-and let customers do the
choosing, says Rebecca Thompson, product manager for Microsoft
Mobile Devices.

Already, infrared-equipped handhelds and cell phones can create
a dial-up connection between the phone and PDA if they are
carefully lined up. But soon the Bluetooth protocol will make
wireless transfers between local devices bulletproof. This
transceiver chipset, due to become standard issue in desktops as
well as handhelds starting this winter, works at up to 30 feet.

Ericsson already offers Bluetooth-equipped phones, and other
cell phone-makers can simply add it to their batteries. Size and
cost make Bluetooth a tougher fit for handhelds, says Mace, so Palm
will rely on those third-parties in the near-term. Some time early
next year, Palm will introduce new models including a slot for the
new postage-stamp-sized secure digital cards, which will eventually
store as much as 256MB of data or provide Bluetooth or other I/O
functionality. This fall, it will ship the $50 (street) Palm Mobile
Internet Kit to connect Palm III and Palm V models to mobile phones
via an infrared link or a separately sold cable. Similarly,
Microsoft will rely on Socket Commu-nications, which plans a winter
release of a $99 (street) CompactFlash card as a wireless
replacement for its Digital Phone Card that now links Pocket PCs
and phones by cable.

You Talkin' To Me?

By first quarter 2001, Bluetooth cards should join hundreds of
other add-ons already being sold through online catalogs such as
iGo and Hand-ango-and even Amazon.com. Not too far behind are voice
command/synthesis products which will initially be sold by third
parties like Delphi to customers willing to pay extra.

For example, with the Communiport and the right wireless
service, you can use your driving time to dictate a quick thank-you
note to your last client, schedule a meeting with the next or
download driving directions. When traffic really shuts down,
there's the latest news headlines or a quick call to your
online broker.

Once Bluetooth arrives, some hand-helds will get voice
capabilities just by borrowing them from cell phones like the
NeoPoint NP1000. Why reinvent the wheel? Already, Phone.com is
trying to blend Conversa's voice technology with its UP.Browser
for voice navigation of the Web.

It's all so new and volatile that it's hard to see very
far down the road. But those headlights up ahead on the horizon?
That's really mobile computing coming on fast.

Filebox

Where in the world do you want to go wirelessly today? How about
these sites?